The Energy Department said Feb. 21 it intends to extend its contractual arrangement for decommissioning of the Portsmouth Site in Ohio with vendor Fluor-BWXT by up to two years.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management intends to negotiate a sole-source 12-month extension with two six-month options, according to a notice posted on a federal procurement website.
That follow-on award is expected to be sealed by March 28, 2021, when the current contract is set to expire.
Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth is working under a 10-year, $3.4 billion contract, which started in March 2011, for decontamination and decommissioning at the former gaseous diffusion plant complex near the village of Piketon. The vendor team started worked on its final 30-month option for the existing contract in October 2018.
In addition to decontamination and planned demolition of large process buildings previously used in uranium enrichment, the contractor’s work includes building a $900 million facility designed to hold 2 million cubic yards of contaminated waste on-site at Portsmouth. The landfill could begin accepting its first construction debris by November, according to DOE’s budget request.
The Trump administration is proposing to spend about $47 million on construction of the on-site waste facility during fiscal 2021. The disposal site will hold debris from three large uranium enrichment process buildings, the first of which is X-326 and it could start coming down this August, according to DOE.
Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth won 86%, or $19.2 million, of the available $22.78 million in fees for its work during fiscal 2019.
Any parties that want to comment on the proposed sole-source extension should file comments by 4:30 p.m. ET March 9 with Contracting Officer Tyler Hicks of DOE’s Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office, at [email protected].
During the past year the Energy Department helped finance independent air and soil sampling around the grounds of a middle school near the Portsmouth site. The local education board moved students to other schools during the 2019-2020 academic year while reports of radioactive contamination are investigated.
Texas-based Fluor last week did an about-face and announced it would not sell its government contracting business, including work for the Energy Department.
In addition to Portsmouth, Fluor is also the lead partner in Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, which holds the $14.9 billion operations contract for the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. That agreement started in August 2008 and last August was extended through September 2019. Fluor also holds the five-year, $1.86 billion cleanup contract at the Idaho National Laboratory, which runs through May 2020.
Fluor, which is being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for inaccurate financial filings in 2019, had its stock close Thursday at $9.93 per share, only slightly above its 52-week low of $9.89 per share. The company’s 52-week high is listed as almost $42.
